Lack of customer data sharing, integration and insight is undermining competitiveness, retention rates, revenue and profitability among global marketers, according to a new study from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, writes MarketingCharts.

Conducted in late 2007 and early 2008, the audit of more than 450 marketers across the globe found a significant lack of customer knowledge and substantial obstacles and roadblocks to integrating disparate customer data repositories across the enterprise

Among the findings of the CMO Council study, "Business Gain From How You Retain":

• Over 50 percent of global marketers report that they have fair, little, or no knowledge of the customer demographic, behavioral, psychographic and transactional data. Just 6 percent say they have excellent knowledge of the customer.
• Only 50 percent of companies report having a strategy for further penetrating or monetizing key account relationships.
• Some 45 percent of companies rate the effectiveness of customer relationship management (CRM) systems as deficient or needing more work. Just 15 percent rate themselves extremely good or effective at integrating disparate customer data sources and repositories.

Funded by Computer Sciences Corporation, IBM Software and D&B, the study sought to evaluate where and how marketers are "operationalizing" customer intelligence and insight to reduce customer churn, increase lifetime value, improve the customer experience, and increase the effectiveness and targeting of marketing spend.

Marketers are struggling to gain a true and timely view of the customer due to inadequate or incompatible IT systems and databases, siloed data in functional areas, and a limited strategic focus or management mandate on customer data integration (CDI), the CMO Council found.

Compounding the issue is a lack of formalized data-sharing policies and practices in the organization, combined with internal political or cultural barriers and IT obstacles and objections to data integration, it said.

MarketingCharts provides additional key findings from the study.